A pity Blizzard didnt use cataclysm as an oportunity to revamp the whole grapics , like Everquest 1 did once upon a time via addon .

The artsyle is clearly great , but held back by the engine . There is a definitive cartoony style there , but here its just blocky and full of rough edges on the models .

It's not as if people didnt have many years to upgrade , even a little bit their setup . It doesnt even need to be a big jump in requirement to make a world of difference here . Hell WoW was already outdated when out in that area ..

They could certainly squeeze more without losing clients , but they clearly refuse to commit to such endeavour . easy money i guess

I agree to an extent but the graphics aren't terrible. I'm running it on ultra settings, the character models aren't bad, the environments for the most part look great, lighting looks good. Obviously the game wasn't made to be the next Crysis but at the same time they should have upgraded some aspects of the engine (moreso than they did) All in all though combine the graphics/gameplay/content the game is still a win.

The tree models are 2D cutouts placed across one another, and the older race models with their 10 haircuts/ faces and sausage fingers don't even hold up to Free to Play standards anymore. Nor do they mesh with the newer races at all (where you can tell more care and modern techniques have been used). They get points for artistic design, but the character models are way overdue for an update.

There's some of us who have been playing the game since vanilla and can see past the wizard's curtain that Blizz has going on, then there's the WOW apologists. You don't seem like one of them (and I hope it doesn't seem like I'm attacking you :) ).

The game has some serious balancing issues, a total lack of character customization and graphics that are getting dated by the second. When you're the most successful MMO on the Western market there's no excuse for these issues to persist. I played the Cata beta and cancelled my sub before launch.

I would like to see something more than grind>gear>instance/ pvp tier> rinse/ repeat. It's been the same formula since EQ and I accuse almost all MMO developers of being lazy in this regard. Not to mention that the gear cycles in WOW are getting shorter and shorter. What's the point in working so hard for something that will just be replaced in 3 months. They should be scaling WOW laterally - more quests, titles, options, vanity choices, houses, whatever - instead of just adding ridiculous numbers onto every piece of gear.

Why would they ever revamp their whole graphics engine in any significant way? That'd lose them a ridiculous amount of subscribers just so it can look a bit prettier - pointless.

Blizzard do a fantastic job of making stuff look awesome thanks to great art design rather than on a technical level. They always add minor graphical improvements in each expansion which is why the requirements go up ever so slightly, such as the new water in Cata.

in all fairness they needed it to be able to run on all computer systems at the time, I mean just look at FFXIV it runs like crap on high end systems if you try to increase setting to max, at least thats what I heard.